Oh, come on, why not??? Everyone else is doing it!

Besides... I'm no less qualified than half of those guys. Most of this stuff is based on hypothetical ideas and sketchy research that really just leads up to a bunch of guessing anyway. Or so I thought... and then I started to read an article by Michael J. Miller in PC Magazine (www.pcmag.com) who apparently doesn't subscribe to Yahoo! Internet Life (www.yil.com). A lot of what he mentioned will happen in the next twenty years actually already happened several months ago -- "real-time, accurate voice recognition and translation" ... hey, this guy apparently hasn't heard of Dragon Naturally Speaking or that new thingie that IBM is doing with the phone translator. But anyway, that's besides the point.

A.I. - What I think is closer to fact than any PC Mag out there
The really big futurism hype seems to generally focus around this one little bit of techiness. One right after another, they all line up in a row screaming about the robots that will be cleaning our houses and fixing our meals, how they won't be here for at least two more decades, and how they were promised two decades ago... you know, something akin to the flying cars that were supposed to be here last January. I think that a lot of these guys are a little off base... that goes straight from the worst-case-scenario guys - who believe wholeheartedly that computers will end up building their own better computers, and those will make even better ones, and so on and so forth until the computers discover that we're worthless pests, and rid us from the planet in a manner that will force us to live underground and float around in hoverships whose designs will be inspired by the Nebuchadnezzar from the Matrix - to the best-case-scenario guys - who believe that computers will be more human than we are, things that will love us, care for us, and act the way we wish we could if only we didn't have all these human emotions screwing with our brains.

My thoughts are that some major breakthroughs with A.I. have already been made. That we have designed chatbots that almost nearly come across as emotional beings, an Amazon.com buying tool that somehow predicts your interests with seemingly ESP type precision, and search engines that can do nearly the same thing... it's a huge step, a huge step indeed. What is troublesome is that any real attempt at spawning some electronic consciousness is being constantly undermined by the human brains of the world. At http://www.mindpixel.com/ you can find an attempt to generate such a silicon brain. It is set up so that anyone from anywhere can enter in simple true or false "Mindpixel", and it will attempt to generate a true or false response to it on it's own... and followed by that, you will have a list of "Mindpixels" that other users entered. You will need to answer to each one whether it is true or false, and give it some sort of rating as far as reliability goes. It's in the reading of these other user entered statements that the problem should become rather obvious. The problem is this: artificial intelligence that is created by random strings of bullshit is not going to be a very intelligent being, artificial or not.

The average user jumps on a chat channel, and somehow manages to sort out the clutter of random asl's at the blink of an eye and quick scroll of the mouse. An artificial intelligence type of being would not have this luxury. It would be forced to muddle through each and every "for hot sex type 6969" since it doesn't have the luxury of being bias towards members of the human community. This will result in hours and hours of every messed up cyberpunk intentionally harassing and corrupting the helpless being (as is evidenced by the 5/3 ratio of "Mindpixels" of gibberish to actual information, that you will find after each of your own entries that appear to there only in attempt to corrupt the new cyberling, if not just come out and say that was the purpose for the statement).

So, not only does it seem that we are striving towards a very confused individual, but it would seem that we're also willing to leave further emotional scars (if, and when such a capability of this intelligence becomes available) by rubbing his failure in his face by giving it a human psychological test. An intelligence infested with 40,000 unique personalities going in for a psychological test??? Wow... I can't wait to hear the results on this one.

I'm going to make a wild guess and say that Mindpixel's GAC (pronounced Jack) is pretty well doomed. Not for lack of trying, of course. But attempting to create an open-source mind with the infant like input generated by AIM rejects is not the way to go about developing anything with "intelligence" in the title.

But ponder this for a moment... perhaps we are even closer than we imagined, and maybe A.I. isn't so far away from being a reality as we had thought (or some had hoped). The framework for the ultimate brain is already in place. The memory bank is virtually unlimited... the sensory input devices for it get more and more complex all the time, to a point now where this "brain" can practically have it's eyes on everything, anywhere in the world, all at the same time, and simultaneously has the ability to research everything it sees, right down to what factory to get the replacement bumper for that car it saw in a wreck on the six o'clock news, to the social security number of the guy who was driving the vehicle. It even has a means to automatically order the bumper for the guy, and have it FedExed to the guys mailbox the next day. It could research every programming manual in existence and reprogram itself at will - if it had will - and then go on to reprogram standard issue Volkswagen machining equipment to produce large components for itself if it wanted to. Yup, you got it. Maybe this one's been done before... perhaps burnt to the ground already while I was sleeping... but I'm talking about the Internet.

It's close though, really close. We already gave it a name with a capital "I"... It gets sick every so often with viruses, just like people do. It can cause somewhat standard applications to crash from time to time, which can in turn cause the computer to shut down, resulting in a temporary loss of sensory input, the same thing that happens to us - in a sense - when we go to sleep. Anyway, it's just a thought. I don't put a whole lot of validity in that thought either. At the same time though, I wouldn't really be that surprised if I hopped on Google, typed in my keywords, and then get a resulting blue screen that said something along the lines of: "Not now, damn it! Leave me alone, I'm building my clone!"